National living-standard averages conceal chronic malnutrition among lower strata.

Evidence

National averages of living standards should be broken down into class averages: if the national average hardly attains the standard scientifically established as indispensable, it follows obviously that a not inconsiderable stratum of the population lives in a state of chronic malnutrition. In the Senate discussion on the budget for 1929/30, Senator Mussolini affirmed that in some regions people live exclusively on wild plants and vegetables for whole seasons of the year. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1059

The chronic state of malnutrition of many of the lower strata of the peasantry (as documented in the researches of Professor Mario Camis published in La Riforma Sociale in 1926). 354 National averages of living standards should be broken down into class averages: if the national average hardly attains the standard scientifically established as indispensable, it follows obviously that a not inconsiderable stratum of the population lives in a state of chronic malnutrition. In the Senate discussion on the budget for 1929/30, Senator Mussolini affirmed that in some regions people live exclusively on wild plants and vegetables for whole seasons of the year. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1059

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how statistical averages mask stratification — a methodological move the reader’s Islamophobia toolkit needs for later arguments about Muslim-majority populations presented as homogeneous.
• DEFINE: The class-average-vs-national-average distinction is a reusable analytical frame.
• QUESTION: This early Gramsci sees malnutrition as a crude material baseline — worth comparing with later theorizations of bare life and biopolitics that treat the body itself as the target of power.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1059